The Strong Angel relief project relied on a host of military and civilian technologists, not to mention process specialists and logisticians. Here are some of the key players.

STRONG ANGEL

Eric Rasmussen
CommanderU.S. Navy
Led the 2000 and 2004 Strong Angel exercises. A Navy physician and researcher for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), his expertise is in the application of information technology to medicine -and language-translation software. Words he lives by? From his father, a Norwegian resistance fighter imprisoned during World War II by the Nazis: "Never let the bad guys win."

Dave WarnerIndependent Consultant
Warner was in charge of Strong Angel's telemedicine experiments, which looked at the field use of biosensors and other technologies in emergency situations. He is a former Army drill instructor turned medical neuroscientist, freelance technology researcher and self-described "California tree-hugger."

Dan Engle
PrincipalNextNet Consulting
A networking specialist who retired in 2003 from the U.S. Navy. Investigated communications breakdowns affecting the Navy's participation in the tsunami relief effort. He once served as the first deputy director of the Navy's Network Centric Innovation Center, a group within the Navy that assesses network technologies for practical applications.

Dennis McGinn
Vice PresidentBattelle
This retired vice admiral and one-time commander of the U.S. Navy's Third Fleet championed the idea of the Strong Angel exercises. He tapped Rasmussen to lead the effort, knowing that he had served in disaster response missions and had contacts who could pull together U.N. agencies and relief organizations. He joined Battelle, a technology R&D firm, in 2003.

Linton Wells II
Acting Asst. Secretary/CIOU.S. Department of Defense
A former destroyer squadron commander with a Ph.D. in international relations, Wells was one of the key supporters of Strong Angel and approved Rasmussen's trip to Indonesia.

PARTNERS

Mark Prutsalis
Consultant, Crisis Response TeamIBM
During Strong Angel II, he went into the field to work on the DARPA Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization research project, which tested language translation software. He was also in Indonesia as part of IBM's Crisis Response Team.

Ted Okada
Senior Humanitarian Systems ArchitectGroove Networks
Part of the team in Strong Angel II supporting Groove Virtual Office, collaborative software that lets people share documents over the Internet using everyday desktop and portable computers. A mathematician by training, he has spent about 20 years working with various humanitarian agencies, figuring out, among other things, how to use geographic information systems to plan and organize humanitarian missions.

Robert Kirkpatrick
Senior Sales EngineerGroove Networks
Worked with Rasmussen in Iraq fielding collaborative tools based on Groove software for tasks such as assessing the quality of health care, nutrition and other aspects of life following the invasion. At Strong Angel II, he developed data collection and analysis forms for matching offers of aid with requests for help during an emergency.

Milton Chen
Chief Technology OfficerVSee Lab
During Strong Angel II, he showed how videoconferencing software could be used to improve convoy security. With cameras attached to the hoods of convoy trucks, drivers would be immediately alerted if a vehicle ran into troublean attack or a simple potholeallowing other trucks to avoid the situation.

Nigel Snoad
Chief Information OfficerUnited Nations Joint Logistics Centre
Served as the coordinator in the first weeks of the tsunami response for the U.N. logistics operation on the ground in the Aceh region of Indonesia. In 2004, he represented UNJLC at Strong Angel II and later that year was operations center information manager for Triplex, an international disaster preparedness exercise run by the U.N.